The Spanish Guide to Understanding Brokerage Account Statements
Nightly Business Report
Thursday, May 04, 2006
SUSIE GHARIB: Tonight’s commentator says amid all the furor over immigration and this week’s Hispanic boycott, one important factor is being overlooked. Here’s Myron Kandel, president of the New Hampshire Initiative for Corporate Responsibility and Investor Protection.
MYRON KANDEL, NEW HAMPSHIRE INITIATIVE FOR CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY: Amidst all the attention being focused on immigration, I’d like to talk about a related matter: the economic importance of the Hispanic community and the Hispanic investor market in particular. What brings this to mind is the publication in Spanish of a guide to understanding brokerage account statements. The Securities Industry Association and the North American Securities Administrators Association jointly published the guide some years ago. Now they’ve done it in Spanish.
We can all argue over whether the national anthem should be sung in Spanish, but there can be no denying that Spanish-speaking investors, many of them relatively new, deserve all the protection and information they can get. That’s why I applaud this publication. The guide can be an important step toward promoting investor education among this fast-growing segment of American society. Twelve percent of the nation speaks Spanish. There are some two million Hispanic-owned businesses, and one estimate says Hispanic households with more than $100,000 in annual earnings are growing at twice the rate of the general population. Hispanic buying power is projected to reach $1 trillion by the end of this decade. That means a lot of investable income and as more and more Hispanics become investors, they need to know how to understand their brokerage statements. I’m Myron Kandel.